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A jam submission

Critical System FailureView game page

Submitted by datoneguy246, ChadVader29 — 3 minutes, 11 seconds before the deadline
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Critical System Failure's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Concept and Creativity#24.0124.333
Overall#7n/an/a
Artwork, Aesthetics, and Overall Presentation#73.5493.833
Fun#112.7773.000

Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Theme Interpretation
You play as a robot infected with malware (theme 1).
The robot has to mine deep into the earth to find the cure (theme 2).
You only have a certain amount of time before the infection takes over (theme 3).

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Comments

Submitted

This is genuinely a super impressive project (especially because you guys said you started like a week before the end of the jam?!). There are so many technically impressive aspects of the game (procedural generation, the actual mining, etc.) and the core concept is genuinely really cool. The pixel art is also really well done, and the sprites look great. 

I do also have a couple small nitpicks with the game:

1. The UI controls are really weird when I go to isolate the malware to a different system. I wasn't able to actually click, and I had to move my right side to the arrow keys and then press space, all while holding tab so the UI didn't close. Personally, I would make it so you can click with the mouse and also have the tab key toggle the UI rather than having to hold it while I'm selecting my system.

2. The game was a little hard. Even when I specifically focused on routing to the syringes that slow down the malware, I still couldn't get past the second level. There are a couple things you could try to fix this, but what I would personally like to see is there be more caves, more syringes, and maybe have some of the higher tier blocks be a little easier to mine.

3. While the ground tiles themselves look really good, I think the aesthetic of the game would've seem more immersive if, when there were no tiles bordering it on a certain side, the sprite changed slightly to be more aligned with the rest of the world (the best example would be how Terraria rounds exposed corners of blocks). 

Obviously I talked a lot about the few things I think could be improved a bit, but they really are mostly nitpicky stuff, and with more content, I think this game has a lot of potential. Again, the core concept is really interesting, and made the gameplay incredibly engaging (having to think about multiple things at once rather than just mindlessly mining away), and the soundtrack and sfx were really well done too. Overall, really great entry!

Developer

Thanks for the feedback! I agree with your nitpicks. We didn’t have enough time to fully polish each mechanic; once something was built, it was on to the next thing with minimal testing. In the days since we submitted I’ve definitely realized a lot of things I could’ve done better (a lot of which you’ve touched on). I’ve been considering fixing up some stuff and making a “post-jam” build.

I never played that much Terraria, but I can definitely visualize how rounding the exposed corners would make a big difference. It could potentially be really simple to implement as well by just masking the sprites instead of making new sprite variants for every tile… (but who knows… I’ll have to experiment with that)

Anyways, I’m glad you enjoyed it!

Submitted

I also know that Unity has auto-tiling stuff for level building that can change the sprites of tiles when you place them (but I have no clue if that works at runtime) as well. Not sure if that would work but might be worth a try at some point. Either way, thanks for the response, and really nice work on the game!